(To Caroline Augusta Hopper)

'Tis I go fiddling, fiddling,
By weedy ways forlorn;
I make the blackbird's music
Ere in his breast 'tis born:
The sleeping larks I waken
'Twixt the midnight and the morn.
No man alive has seen me,
But women hear me play
Sometimes at door or window,
Fiddling the souls away,-
The child's soul and the colleen's
Out of the covering clay.
None of my fairy kinsmen
Makes music with me now:
Alone the raths I wander
Or ride the whitethorn bough,
But the wild swans they know me
And the horse that draws the plough.